Of Hit Men, Cats, and Candy Thieves
by PI-Valkyrie-exLorien
Summary: Tauriel and Eowyn in the NCIS universe; a thank you story of sorts for annafan, for her support throughout the process of scrapping together an insane parody. Tauriel comes home from the bullpen one evening to find a familiar face from Middle Earth looking to hire an assassin. Low T.


**This is a gapfiller one-shot between _Matchmaker, Matchmaker_ and sequel I'm going to be writing that you can expect in a week or two. It introduces a couple of concepts of the sequel and ties up some loose ends from Matchmaker. There's not much you'll understand here if you haven't read Matchmaker, although the sequel/companion will have new characters and such and not really be tied to the original.**

**This is also a thank you to annafan for continuous support as I develop what I hope are becoming well-honed skills in the art of parody. She requested a Tauriel and Eowyn in the NCIS bullpen one-shot, and this kind of popped into my head. **

Tauriel pulled up to the flat she shared with Eowyn, heaving a long sigh and turning off the radio. She'd developed a particular love for seventies country music during her time in the modern AU-verse, much to the chagrin of her wife, who preferred hard rock. Their differing tastes in music had been the only reason Tauriel went and bought her own car, but she hadn't regretted it. Eowyn was running an investigation on Mary-Sues in modern-AU verses after hours at the bullpen. NCIS headquarters had so much technology that they would have been a fool not to take advantage of it, but Tauriel herself was enjoying the time she spent away from Mary Sues and fic-jumping, so she'd left that business to Eowyn.

Her ears perked at the sound of rustling from inside her house. The curtains swayed in the window, and a shadow passed behind them. Eyes narrowed, Tauriel drew her standard issue NCIS pistol and cocked it, aiming for the front door as she approached. She reached into the bush on her porch and pulled out a stun gun with her free hand. The stun gun in the bushes had been Eowyn's idea, just in case a hit man (or worse, a vengeful Sue) decided to lie in wait for them outside their house. Back then, she had laughed. Now, she was grateful for the idea.

She advanced on the house, stun gun in one hand and real gun in the other, using every bit of her natural Elvish stealth to keep silent until she was within arm's length of the door. Then, abandoning a quiet approach, she kicked the door open.

"Federal agent!" she shouted into the empty house. "Nobody move!"

But the house was dark and empty, save for the one-eyed grey cat sitting in her entryway, staring at her with wide eyes.

"Spalko?" she muttered, eyeing the cat. She and Eowyn had picked it up from a murder victim's house a few months previous and kept it, even naming it after their favorite crazy Sue-slayer.

Still holding out her gun, she made a clean sweep of the kitchen and bedrooms and made to advance on the living room, the overhead lights still out, but tapping against the floor below her easy chair was a very human foot. And if she listened closely, she could hear the slight crunch of sour candy. What kind of pathetic assassin made use of their victim's easy chair and raided the pantry while they waited to be discovered and possibly shot?

Finger on the trigger of her pistol, she turned on the lights.

"Haldir would have your ass if you shot me," said the invader, without moving a muscle. Tauriel lowered her gun.

"What are you doing here?" she demanded.

"I wanted to talk to you."

"You could have called me. Or knocked on the door. You didn't have to break into my house."

"I found it amusing, listening to you go through every room expecting someone out to kill you."

"I have a lot of people who want to kill me right now," Tauriel growled. Without a word, her guest spun the easy chair around to look the stunned Elf in the eye.

"Which is the very reason I decided to drop by," said Colonel Spalko, her lips stretching into a maniacal grin. She rested one hand on her lap as the other stroked her furry namesake.

Tauriel glared at the cat. "Spalko, you're not supposed to be on that chair," she reprimanded sharply, before turning to the real Colonel Spalko. "And you look ridiculous, stroking the cat like some crazy supervillain."

With a resigned sigh, the Colonel rose to her feet, and Tauriel rolled her eyes.

"Not you," she clarified for the sake of her 'houseguest.' "Although you must really need to cash in a favor if you're willing to get out of that chair just because I requested it."

Spalko sat back down, drumming her fingers together. "I can't believe you named your cat after me," she balked after a moment of thought, letting out a humorless chuckle.

"I can't believe that at nine months pregnant you managed to get from the kitchen window to the living room with a handful of my hard candy, and I didn't hear a thing."

The Colonel smirked. "The hard candy wasn't just for me," she said, her eyes delivering a rather bored appearance. "It was to appease your insane cat so it didn't claw my eyes out when I showed up today. I've been feeding it for a week."

"You've been here for a whole week, feeding my cat Jolly Ranchers, and you couldn't just pay me a friendly visit at NCIS headquarters or something, instead of breaking an entry? You're unbelievable."

"I know," said Spalko, looking up at the redheaded Elf nonchalantly. "Now obviously I have a reason for being here."

"You got sick of staying in Lothlorien and trying to take it easy?"

"Well yes," Spalko admitted thoughtfully, "but that is only half of it."

"Then what's the other half, pray tell? Because the longer I sit there, the greater the chance is that I'll be driving you to the emergency room because fic-jumping through the Fourth Wall (or whatever's left of it) induces labor."

"Oh, relax," she drawled. "Galadriel read my future before she sent me here; I have another week to go, minimum."

"Galadriel sent you?" asked Tauriel pointedly, her eyes wide with surprise.

"Of course. Did you think I would willingly degrade myself to diplomatically appeasing your house pet so I could get in here unnoticed?"

"There's nothing diplomatic about bribing someone's cat."

"Well, I knew you had chips and nacho cheese, and that's a delicacy only modern AUs can get. I figured as long as I was in this universe I would indulge until I found you."

"I _knew _you had ulterior motives breaking into my house! And to think all this time I had been blaming Eowyn's somnambulism for the missing nachos."

With no sarcastic quip to respond with, Spalko pinched the bridge of her nose, her face hardening with stress. "We need to stop this petty bickering. I do have a serious reason for being here."

"Well what is it?"

"I need an assassin."

"I thought you _were _an assassin, especially when I saw someone in the window of my house, rooting through every piece of nothing I keep in my kitchen."

Spalko let out a breath, knitting her fingers together. "I am an assassin. Technically, I suppose I'm a military commander, but I have been killing off Sues quiet efficiently for the past few years. But… well I can't exactly be a proper assassin right now, can I?" she finished, gesturing to her belly.

"And you want me to be your hired gun? Why don't you just take one of Gibbs's sniper rifles? Not this Gibbs, obviously, but the one in your universe. This Gibbs would probably kill me, fire me, then kill me again if I gave an ex-KGB commander a gun like that. But I'm sure our author's AU verse's Gibbs has one stored away somewhere."

"I refuse to be a sniper," said Spalko harshly. "There's a certain moral detachment required to take somebody out at close range that I pride myself on. Sniping removes that need for psychological strength. They don't have to look their victims in the eyes when they pull the trigger."

Tauriel scrunched up her face at the imagery. "I know your hormones are all out of wack, and I don't doubt you'll be a great mother and all that, but you might want to dial back the sadistic talk just a bit."

"I'm referring to Mary Sues," Spalko hissed under her breath. "Don't tell me you don't like to see them turn to dust when they die. But that's the other problem. We can't shoot the more powerful ones. We have to send them back to their authors, and that requires close range battle and a great deal of writing. I don't write, Tauriel."

"Neither do I. Eowyn does, in a manner of speaking, but I doubt that would end well, as I'm sure you know already. I myself am not sure how much more fluff I can handle from her." She wrinkled her nose. "I just can't picture you and Haldir getting all mushy and savoring every moment of precious life and talking to your stomach and all that crap."

"Did she write that?" Spalko sounded somewhat insulted.

"The fluff was mostly on Haldir's part, if that's any consolation."

"If he had his way, I'm sure he'd have his hands on my stomach at every given opportunity, but I threatened to shoot him if he did that in public. Not that either of use believe I would actually do it, but he knows I would be furious. It makes me feel like I'll become the stereotypical fanfic-sitcom mother. You know the type, where an entire fan fiction revolves around an unplanned pregnancy and developing love story and no other plot line is involved?"

Tauriel made a face. "I hate those fics. At least Eowyn has the taste to throw in some high stakes action and battle scenes to spice things up a little bit." She shook her head doubtfully. "But I still don't think she wants to be a riffer slash hit man at the moment. We're perfectly happy working at NCIS right now. Although…" another possibility had come to her mind. "I might have another candidate for you."

Spalko's eyebrows shot up.

"Come," said Tauriel. "We're going to pay an after hours visit to the bullpen." She spun on her heel, marching to the door, then looked back to find that Spalko had not followed her.

"One more question, that I never thought I would have to ask," the Colonel stated, her chin proud and somewhat defensive as she spoke. "Does paying a visit to the bullpen require me getting of this chair?"

* * *

They arrived at the bullpen twenty minutes later, Tauriel marching in and demanding to speak with Special Agent Riddermark, as Eowyn had dubbed herself. She found her wife in the forensics lab with none other than Abby Sciuto, going through chemical tests.

The shieldmaiden turned federal agent looked up in shock when she saw Spalko. "What are you doing here?" she demanded with a hand on her hip. "I thought you were in Lothlorien."

"I was. But Galadriel sent me on an assignment."

"Excuse me?" Abby piped up before Eowyn could ask any more questions. "Hi, Tauriel." She grinned at the Elf; then her eyes turned to Spalko. "Who are you?"

She extended her hand stiffly. "Colonel Doctor Irina Spalko. I used to work for Gibbs."

Abby cocked her head, shaking the Colonel's hand. Spalko had managed to shove her accent down her throat for the exchange, trying to appear as if she had come from the modern age and was not an ex-Russian spy. "I don't remember you from anywhere."

"It was a long time ago, in the Marines. I was a commanding officer."

"Well a friend of Gibbs is a friend of mine," Abby said cheerfully, her black braids bouncing on her shoulders as she returned her attention to the chemicals she and Eowyn had been messing with. "What can I do for you? It's after hours, isn't it? Shouldn't you guys be home? I'm just here running some blood samples through the system for Eowyn and cleaning up my precious babies." She grinned, gesturing grandly to the lab equipment.

"Speaking of which," Abby turned to the Rohirric field agent, her eyes lighting up like they always did with particularly fascinating data, "you were right. The people we ran… they aren't in the system. It's really weird; all these twenty-something-year-old women cropping up, with official jobs and credit cards, but with no past that we can trace."

Tauriel's jaw dropped, and she grabbed Eowyn's shoulder, pulling her close.

"You had her run blood samples from Mary Sues?"

"Why not? They're appearing everywhere, and it's only a matter of time before one of them snags poor Gibbs. You know those Gibbs/OC fics as well as I."

"Galadriel only let loose the Tolkien OCs. You know that."

"But we're here, aren't we? This is a Tolkien crossover fic, technically speaking. They're bound to show up eventually, and it's best we be prepared. What's Spalko doing here, anyway? Shouldn't she be in Lothlorien?"

"She says she needs an assassin," Tauriel whispered with an awkward glance at Abby and Spalko as they waited for the couple to finish their quiet conversation.

Eowyn shook her head. "We like it here. We can't just give up on NCIS to go off and hunt Sues."

"That's what I told her. She claims Galadriel sent her to recruit a hit man. But I thought that since Ziva's about to leave anyway in canon, we could get her in on it."

"What makes you think we could send Ziva to Lothlorien as a hired assassin?"

"Well for one it would be more interesting for her then being tossed from the fic. Also-" Tauriel caught her breath as a brilliant idea graced her mind. "Celeborn's a robot. He's like movieverse but worse." Her voice had grown even lower.

Eowyn grimaced. "What does that have to do with anything? Plus, I thought you said he was a purist."

"He's a robot purist. Canon Celeborn's in Valinor with Canon Galadriel living it up." Her lips spread into a grin- the same grin Spalko had greeted her with earlier. "This is Parody Galadriel we're talking about. And Ziva David. Come on, I would totally ship them. That would be the best crossover OTP in the relatively short history of pop culture fanfic slash."

Eowyn's jaw clenched. "No," she hissed roughly. "Not this again. Don't you remember what happened the last time you played matchmaker and set two people up to fall in love?"

"Hmm, let me think," Tauriel said sarcastically. "Oh, now I remember." She held up her hands, counting her fingers as she spoke. "A wedding- no, make that two weddings, four resolutions of sexual tension. Five, if you count the Faramirs. A fake pregnancy, a real pregnancy, and the death of the most infamous Mary Sue that ever lived. Pretty successful, if you add it all up."

Eowyn rolled her eyes exasperatedly. "I'll talk to Ziva. But don't think you'll be able to set her up with Galadriel, even if she accepts this job."

A smile splitting her face ear to ear, Tauriel turned to Colonel Spalko. "We think we can get you that assassin," she said. Behind her, Abby pouted.

"You mean you weren't just here to visit me and bring me caffeine?" She seemed a bit crushed. "Also, what did you mean by 'assassin?'"

Biting her lip, Tauriel looked desperately between Eowyn and Spalko, who seemed to take the cue, and clutched her belly in pain.

"Oh, my water broke," she groaned.

Tauriel acted immediately. "We'll just be leaving now." She dipped her head to Abby, who just nodded, her face morphing into an expression of the utmost concern.

Relieved, Eowyn and Tauriel departed. "Get some sleep, Abby," Eowyn called over her shoulder at the scientist as the door closed behind them.

Back in the safety of the empty bullpen, Tauriel released a sigh of relief. "That was an interesting encounter." She turned to Spalko. "Quick thinking. You could use that excuse to get out of a lot of awkward situations."

The look Spalko gave them in that moment could have put Gibbs to shame in the interrogation room. "That-" she started to say, but was interrupted as the door opened to reveal none other than Haldir the Marchwarden, dressed in a tweed jacket and cap that looked like it could have come from Professor Tolkien himself.

"Hide me," Spalko demanded immediately. "He can't know I'm here; we'll be bickering for weeks over my safety." She looked more tense than she should have as she crept beneath Eowyn's desk.

"This isn't like her," muttered Eowyn suspiciously. She caught sight of Haldir and his outfit at once. "Welcome to the 21st Century," she called out, and he approached them.

"Thank the Valar," he said, relieved. "I had to find you quickly. Lady Galadriel sent me to find an assassin, and we hoped you might know someone."

Tauriel and Eowyn shared a look. "We thought she sent someone else," said Eowyn, trying to keep her tone even.

Haldir pursed his lips. "I'm her Marchwarden. Who else would she send?"

There was a harsh groan and mutter of 'damn the Valar,' from beneath the desk.

"Is that-" Haldir pointed, confused.

"Spalko," confirmed Tauriel.

"Thank you for such loyalty," Spalko drawled cynically, still crouched beneath the desk.

"You know it isn't like you to hide from people."

"Only when they turn out to be right," she replied in a strained voice.

"That if I left Lothlorien I would go into labor at the most inconvenient time possible. You know I can't act; I wasn't exactly pulling one over Abby's head in the lab. Now I get to go through contractions while the great Marchwarden here rubs it in my face that he was right."

"I thought you said you still had a week, and that Galadriel sent you on official business," Tauriel cried indignantly.

"Half-truths," Spalko muttered sheepishly, creeping out from the desk and standing up, with some pained effort, while still trying to appear dignified and authoritative. "Technically, it was Haldir's assignment. And as for the whole 'I have a week thing,' I made that up on the spot. In my defense, the rate of captured Sues was going down as they fanned out, and I got bored."

"Clearly," mumbled Eowyn.

"Now where's a damn midwife?" Spalko demanded.

"Er…" Tauriel scratched the back of her neck. "We can call an ambulance and they can take you to a hospital and pump you with morphine?"

Spalko stopped to consider her options. Loud, flashing vehicle and hospital that would feel to her like quarantine, or fic-jumping back to Middle Earth while having strong contractions.

"You know what?" She clenched her jaw. "Just take me back to Lothlorien."

**Well, I hope you enjoyed that. I will now be off planning my companion story. And yes, you can expect Ziva to make an appearance. The story will be something like Galadriel's Field Guide to Mary Sues. Happy fan-ficcing!**


End file.
